Abstract
Fatigue is a core symptom in many psychological disorders and it can strongly influence everyday productivity. As fatigue effects have been typically demonstrated after long hours of time on task, it was surprising that in a previous study, we accidentally found a decline of temporal order judgment (TOJ) performance within 5–8 min. After replicating prior relevant findings we tested whether pauses and/or feedback relating the participant’s performance to some “standard” can eliminate or reduce this short-term performance decline. We also assessed whether the performance decline is specific to the processes evoked by the TOJ task or it is a product of either general inattentiveness or the lack of willingness to thoroughly follow the task instructions. We found that both feedback and introducing pauses between successive measurements can largely reduce the performance decline, and that these two manipulations likely mobilize overlapping capacities. Performance decline was not present in a similar task when controlling for the TOJ threshold and it was not a result of uncooperative behavior. Therefore, we conclude that the TOJ threshold decline is either specific to temporal processing in general or to the TOJ task employed in the study. Overall, the results are compatible with the notion that the decline of TOJ threshold with repeated measures represents a short-term cognitive fatigue effect. This objective fatigue measure did not correlate with subjective fatigue. The latter was rather related to perceived difficulty/effort, the reduction of positive affectivity, heightened sensitivity to criticism, and the best TOJ threshold.
Highlights
Fatigue is one of the most common symptoms of patients seeking professional care (Stadje et al 2016; Menting et al 2018) and common cause of lost working hours (Ricci et al 2007; Deligkaris et al 2014)
Fatigue can manifest in performance decline, in subjective reports, or in both (Ackerman and Kanfer 2009)
The long-term performance decline was tested on all 16 consecutive temporal order judgment (TOJ) measurements irrespective of the manipulations, as the order of those was counterbalanced across participants
Summary
Fatigue is one of the most common symptoms of patients seeking professional care (Stadje et al 2016; Menting et al 2018) and common cause of lost working hours (Ricci et al 2007; Deligkaris et al 2014). As feedback was the most likely candidate that could explain the differences between our previous results and those of the studies of Bernasconi et al (2011), we will test the effects of performance-feedback by providing feedback that compares the participants’ performance to a standard This procedure is expected to increase the participants’ motivation, as it can be assumed that they do not want to perform below average (Garcia et al 2006) and the need to protect their self-image can strengthen the relative importance of task-performance. We tested whether the performance decline was due to a general decline in attention or the performance deterioration was specific to processes involved in the TOJ task To this end an auditory flanker task was completed four times in a row with participants controlling the rest time between successive task blocks, (similar to the TOJ threshold measurement). Simon and Winkler study (2018) measured the spatial TOJ threshold again four times in a row after all the other psychometric tasks were completed (approximately 1 h from the beginning of the experiment)
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